Maldives Muslims Smash Buddhist Statues

MALE — At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are
testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style
intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.
On
Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president
Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and
destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's
pre-Islamic era.

"They have effectively erased all evidence of our
Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered
building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his
own safety.
"We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made
of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way
we can restore them," he explained.

"I wept when I heard that the
entire display had gone. We are good Muslims and we treated these
statues only as part of our heritage. It is not against Islam to display
these exhibits," he said.

Five people have since been arrested after they returned the following day to smash the CCTV cameras, he said. The
authorities have banned photography of the damage, conscious that
vandalism of this kind which echoes the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan
Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban is damaging for the
nation's image. The gates of the two-storeyed grey building, which opened in 2010, are padlocked and an unarmed guard keeps watch.

The
Maldives, a collection of more than 1,100 coral-fringed islands
surrounded by turquoise seas, is known as a "paradise" holiday
destination that draws hundreds of thousands of travellers and
honeymooners each year. Visitors' contact with the local
population is deliberately kept at bay, however, with most foreigners
simply transferring from the main international airport directly to
their five-star resorts on outlying islands.
Few have any idea
they are visiting a country of 330,000 Muslims with no religious
freedom, where women can be flogged for extramarital sex and consuming
alcohol is illegal for locals. Islam is the official religion of the Maldives and open practice of any other religion is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

The
religious origins of the Maldivian people are not clearly established,
but it is believed that a Buddhist king converted to Islam in the 12th
century. Thereafter, the country practised a mostly liberal form
of the religion, but more fundamentalist interpretations have spread
with the arrival of money and ultra-conservative Salafist preachers from
the Middle East. In 2007, following a bombing that wounded a
dozen foreign tourists, the former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom banned
head-to-toe coverings for women as a sign of his intent to battle
conservative Islamic thinking.

At the museum, another official
said that fundamentalists had threatened to attack the museum on
previous occasions unless it withdrew the Buddhist display.

The
country's ultra-conservative Islamic group, the Adhaalath Party,
condemned the attack, but said they remained opposed to Nasheed's
decision to accept three monuments from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
"Our
constitution does not allow idols and that is why we objected to the
monuments," General Secretary Mohamed Muizzu said, referring to the
gifts to mark a South Asian summit held in November in the Maldives.

The
monuments, which included one of pillar featuring Buddhist motifs, and
which had been on display in the southernmost island of Addu, have all
since been vandalised... More

Islamic Symbols - Swords and Koran

Coercion, intimidation, thuggery and outright terrorism are intrinsic and essential features of Islam.

Islam is so intellectually moribund and ethically repulsive that it
cannot compete for followers in a free marketplace of ideas, but must
eliminate its critics and competitors by whatever means may be
necessary.

Even 1000 year old Buddha statues are a threat to Islam.

With the massive growth of extremist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, we can only expect Jihadists attacks on Buddhism and Buddhists to increase, as this recent article from Point de Basculemakes clear

During the conference a project of Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religionswas discussed. The article 12.4 of the Declaration claims that “Everyone has the right not to have one’s religion denigrated in the media or the academia.”

This push for censorship is part of a wider campaign led by the
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation representing 56 Muslim-majority
countries to silence those who criticize Islam.

While this is happening, several Muslim scholars including many
endorsed by Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood describe non-Muslim
doctrines in a very denigrating way. We do not suggest that these
authors should be censored or banned. We bring up this contradiction to
highlight the fact that radical Islamists want it both ways.

Syed Maududi and other renowned Muslim scholars have written that kafirs (derogatory word for non-Muslims) will go to hell. They have claimed that Christianity is a distorted religion. In an Islamic Studies course
set up by two Muslim Brotherhood operatives for the Edmonton Public
School Board, Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an is being used as a reference book. In
this book, Jews are described as “apes and swine” (p. 1742). More examples of anti-Jewish stances found in the book are listed in a FrontPage article that
was published after the Los Angeles school board decided to pull all
its copies of Yusuf Ali’s Qur’an from the shelves of its libraries.

The depiction of Buddhism in Muslim Brotherhood-endorsed books
destined to Muslim audiences is no more positive than that of
Christianity and Judaism. In fact, it is worse. Harun Yahya’s book Islam and Buddhism is a good example to illustrate where the Muslim Brotherhood and Tariq Ramadan’s “understanding of Islam” leads.

Harun Yahya is a prolific author promoted by various organizations
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yahya is a Turkish national born
in 1956 whose real name is Adnan Oktar.

Harun Yahya is a frequent contributor to OnIslam,
a Muslim Brotherhood news portal closely associated with Youssef
Qaradawi. In September 2010, Yahya was identified as a regular OnIslam staff. (GMBDR about OnIslam)

The semi-private library operated by the Muslim
Students Association (MSA) at Concordia University in Montreal has 44
books (28 different titles) written by Harun Yahya. The MSA is one of
the oldest Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America. The MSA’s library
at Concordia contains books that are endorsed by the Muslim
Brotherhood. It has no formal link with the University’s own libraries
(catalogue, etc.) but it is operated in Concordia University premises
and funded by the Council of Student Life.

Another MSA chapter at Memorial University (St
John’s, Newfoundland) promotes Harun Yahya’s books and movies at their
regular booth on campus premises. (Video)

Muzammil Siddiqi,
an important leader of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the United
States has specifically praised one of Harun Yahya’s books. (Letter)

Point 4.18of
a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood internal memorandum stresses the importance
of “role distribution” among the organization’s activists in order to
achieve success. While Tariq Ramadan is trying to take advantage of the
Dalai Lama’s reputation to legitimize censoring the critics of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Harun Yahya is busy telling Brotherhood’s supporters
what they should really think about Buddhism.

In 2004, Harun Yahya and his colleague Tariq Ramadan were the main speakers at a conference that Ramadan describes as the “largest Islamic event in Australia” on his website.

Harun Yahya claims that Buddhists are guilty of “association” and that their accomplishments are “destined for destruction”

In his book Islam and Buddhism,
Harun Yahya concludes that Buddhists’ accomplishments are purposeless
and that they are “destined for destruction” because their understanding
of God and religion is incompatible with Islam. Harun Yahya accuses
Buddhists of “associating” false gods with the real one:

To deny the supremacy of God and worship the
idols of an ordinary person, as the Buddhists do, is described in the
Qur'an as to "associate something with God." In hundreds of places in
the Qur'an, God reminds us that this "association" is a very serious
sin. For example: “(Qur'an, 4:48) God does not forgive anything being
associated with Him, but He forgives whoever He wills for anything other
than that. Anyone who associates something with God has committed a
terrible crime.

(...) To bow before these invented gods is a
terrible crime against God. As stated in the Qur'an (4: 48), God may
forgive those who commit every other sin and error, but never one who
associates His creatures with Him. (Islam and Buddhism – Chapter 1)

Historically, this so-called crime of “association” has been the
pretext invoked by Muslim scholars to justify the destruction and the
eradication of the Buddhist civilization from India, Afghanistan and
many other parts of Asia.

Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406) is one of many scholars endorsed by Tariq Ramadan. In his classic Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun explains why resorting to coercion and violence against Buddhists and non-Muslims in general is justified:

In
the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the
universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert
everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. ...continued

"The general Islamic term for the period of history before the advent of Islam, as well as the pre-Islamic period of any nation’s history, is jahiliyya, or the period of ignorance and barbarism. Consequently, any art, literature, or architecture that any non-Islamic culture produces has no value whatsoever: it is all simply a manifestation of that ignorance and barbarism. The celebrated writer V. S. Naipaul encountered this attitude in his travels through the Islamic world. For Muslims, he observed, “The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/09/muslim-grave-desecration-and-jihad/